The Demon Code (56 page)
‘Are you mad?’ he hissed. ‘Do you want to die?’
‘Nobody’s killing anyone,’ Tillman said quietly – quietly enough that the click when he thumbed the safety of the Beretta sounded indecently loud. It was just as well that he took the reins of the conversation, because Rush’s windpipe was crimped tightly by what felt like Nahir’s elbow, and he couldn’t either talk or take a breath. His face was pressed flat against the gravel of the narrow walkway, without him having much idea of how it had got there, and none of his limbs were free to move. The ball was very much in everybody else’s court.
‘You should put the gun away,’ Nahir said to Tillman. ‘Or this will end badly.’
‘I’m happy to,’ Tillman told him. ‘But let the kid up. He was just trying to get our attention.’
‘He has my attention. And I can break his neck whether you fire on me or not.’
‘Works better if you let him up and I put this away.’
There was a short, painful silence. At least, it was painful for Rush.
‘I’ll release him,’ Nahir said. ‘But if he speaks again, I’ll break both of his arms.’
The immobilising pressure on every moving part of Rush’s body was suddenly eased as Nahir rose. Nonetheless, Rush stayed where he was. He could only be thrown down again if he made the mistake of getting up.
‘Come and see the frigging door,’ he said, his voice slightly strangulated.
‘You have been warned, boy.’
‘No,’ Tillman said. ‘Let’s go and see the door. You’ve convinced me, Rush. Whatever it is you’ve found, you just put your neck on the line for it.’
‘Whatever it takes,’ Rush wheezed, picking himself up.
They took the stairs even more slowly going down. Tillman seemed to be cramping up a little and needed a lot more support. He was okay over the flat, though, so Rush led the way to the double doors and pointed through them towards the pit.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Far side. Under the skylight.’
Nahir entered first, and Rush stood aside to let Tillman precede him, too. He wanted them to see for themselves. Then, belatedly, he noticed that the sun had gone in again, so they might not see the outline of the door at all. ‘Okay,’ he said, hurriedly stepping between them. ‘Let me show you.’
He needn’t have worried. The discontinuity in the wall of the grease pit was clearly visible, despite the poor light, because the door was standing open and the darkness beyond it was much deeper than the darkness on either side.
But it wasn’t the door that Nahir and Tillman were looking at.
It was the man standing on the opposite side of the pit, directly facing them.
‘This is unfortunate,’ the man said. His tone was calm, almost solemn.
‘Ber Lusim,’ Nahir gasped. He seemed frozen to the spot, unable to process what he was seeing.
And Rush felt something that was almost like vertigo. They’d come so far to attend this meeting, he felt for a split second as though maybe there was such a thing as predestination after all.
Ber Lusim was looking from one to the other of them, with cool, detached appraisal. If he felt threatened or alarmed at their being there, it didn’t show in his face or his stance – which when Rush thought about it was pretty frightening.
‘In these closing moments of the old order,’ Ber Lusim said to them, ‘it’s still possible for men to die. But after this last, great dying, death will end for ever.’ An incantatory quality had crept into his voice. ‘I feel, therefore, that it might be presumption on my part if I were to kill you. Arrogance. As though I asserted my citizenship of this time, this world, even as I usher in the next world, the world everlasting. I have no great desire to do that. Therefore, if you wish to die, you must express an explicit preference – or volunteer yourselves for death by some unambiguous action.’
Nahir crossed his hands over his chest and suddenly had two sica blades between his fingers.
Ber Lusim laughed, as though this were a joke that he richly appreciated.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Something like that.’
Nahir’s hands flashed outwards and up in a movement so fluid and graceful that he looked to Rush, for an insane moment, like a flamenco dancer striking the pose that begins the dance. The two knives, leaving his fingers at the same time, drew parallel lines in the air.
Ber Lusim barely seemed to move in response, but now there was a knife in his hand, too, and it met each of Nahir’s thrown blades along their separate trajectories. Two high, ringing notes sounded, like the chiming of a bell. Nahir’s knives leaped away to right and left, the right-hand one glittering like a Catherine wheel as it hit a sudden shaft of sunlight.
Nahir was drawing again and so was Tillman – presumably a gun rather than a knife – but Ber Lusim was faster than either of them. He crossed the grease pit in a standing long jump, landing between the two men, and he didn’t seem to mind very much that he was now fighting a war on two fronts.
Nahir thrust at Ber Lusim with a third sica, aiming for his chest. Ber Lusim leaned away and his own hand came up inside Nahir’s guard. The knife he held, unexpectedly reversed, slashed deeply into Nahir’s wrist, almost severing his hand.
By this time, Tillman had his gun out and aimed, but his movements seemed almost comically slow compared to those of the two
Elohim
. Ber Lusim didn’t even turn to face him. He just took the gun out of Tillman’s hand with a near-vertical kick, then returned his attention to Nahir.
A series of lightning-quick sweeps of the blade forced Nahir – who now only had one hand to defend with – to give ground hurriedly, and took Ber Lusim, as he followed, out of Tillman’s reach.
Tillman lumbered after him. Rush, who up to this point had stood frozen in shock, recovered himself enough to yell, ‘Leo, don’t!’ He launched himself forward, but in the three seconds it took him to reach them a whole lot of things happened.
Ber Lusim stopped dead, letting Tillman run against him. The Messenger took a solid punch to the side of the head, but it didn’t seem to affect him – and at the same time he hammered his elbow into Tillman’s throat.
Nahir pressed a desperate attack, jumping into what he presumed was a gap in Ber Lusim’s guard. Ber Lusim blocked, feinted, blocked, and then sliced Nahir’s other wrist, in a deliberate, mocking echo of the earlier attack.
Nahir’s charge faltered, pain and alarm flickering across his face. Ber Lusim bent from the waist to deliver a roundhouse kick to Nahir’s stomach, then slammed the hilt of the knife into the side of the other man’s head as he folded. Except that it wasn’t a hilt, because a sica didn’t have a hilt, as such, just a sharp end and a blunter end. The blunt end was still a narrow wedge of steel, which bit into Nahir’s skull with a sound like a cleaver dissecting a watermelon.
And Ber Lusim still had time, before Rush reached him, to bring the knife around so that the tip of it pointed at the centre of Rush’s chest. Rush stumbled to a halt with the razor-sharp blade touching his skin, having parted the thin fabric of his shirt as though it wasn’t even there.
‘Think on it,’ Ber Lusim said calmly, as Nahir fell full-length and Tillman crumpled to his knees. ‘They had weapons, at least. You have nothing. But if you wish it, then come.’
Tillman was fumbling for his fallen gun. Ber Lusim kicked him in the face with brutal force, sending him toppling sideways into the grease pit. There was a moment when Rush could have dodged around the knife and attacked him. But he couldn’t make his body move: rooted to the spot with terror, he stared down at Tillman’s unmoving body. Leo was facedown in the muck and ooze that covered the floor of the pit. If he wasn’t dead already, he was probably about to drown or suffocate.
Rush forced himself into motion. He turned his back on Ber Lusim, while his hindbrain screamed at him to duck and cower and fall into a foetal huddle, and jumped down into the pit.
This time he didn’t manage to keep his footing. He went over on his back in the rancid oil and floundered grotesquely for a second or two before he could roll over and right himself. He crawled across to Tillman, pawed at him with hands now thick with grease and finally managed to turn him onto his back. The big man was profoundly unconscious, but he was breathing.
Rush got his hands under Tillman’s armpits and hauled on him. Tillman was a dead weight, but Rush managed to move him an inch at a time over to the wall of the pit. He propped Tillman up there, wedged into the corner, so that he couldn’t easily slip down again.
Rush was conscious of Ber Lusim’s presence above and behind him – the Messenger’s utter silence probably, but not necessarily, meaning that he wasn’t moving.
‘Have you come a long way?’ Ber Lusim asked.
Small talk, from the saint of killers.
‘London,’ Rush said. ‘Budapest. New York. I’m sure you can fill in the dots.’ He was going for bravado, but his voice – in his own ears, at least – sounded high and weak.
Ber Lusim laughed, as though Rush had said something funny, and jumped down beside him – then walked on, past him, towards the open door.
‘We expect to walk a straight line,’ he said, looking back at Rush over his shoulder. ‘I’m not sure where that hope comes from. Experience should teach us that there are no straight lines in nature. God doesn’t draw with a ruler. What’s your name, boy?’
And Rush took the insult on the chin this time, because what else had he just been, while the men fought it out?
‘Ben,’ he said.
‘That’s half a name. It means
son of
. Where is the rest?’
‘Rush. Ben Rush.’
Ber Lusim looked momentarily startled. ‘Ben Rush,’ he repeated.
‘Yeah.’ Rush swallowed hard and looked down at Tillman. ‘Look, he’s in a bad way. Will you let me go, so I can get some help for him?’
‘Of course not,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘What help could there be, in any case? In twenty minutes’ time, this building will be a crater. And after that, all reckoning of time will stop. Leave him. I want to show you something.’
He indicated the doorway.
‘What?’ Rush said.
‘Go inside,’ Ber Lusim ordered him.
‘I … what’s inside? Why would I go in there?’ Rush hadn’t been afraid of the dark since he was seven years old, but right then that square opening seemed to be full of inimical promise.
‘You came a long way to find me,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘And you succeeded, where everyone else failed. That was a striking and exceptional thing – and obviously it was meant, as all things are meant. The prophet taught me that, when I had forgotten it, or learned to act as if it weren’t true. I’m going back inside, Ben Rush. I can’t leave you behind me, on your feet and free to leave. If you insist on staying here, I’ll respect that. But—’ he raised his hand and the knife stropped the air as he flicked it back and forth with terrifying dexterity ‘—I’ll have to make sure you’re unable to move. The quickest and easiest way to do that would be to sever your spinal column and the nerve stem that runs through it. The decision is yours. I’ll give you a few moments to consider it.’
‘No, I … I’m good. I mean, I’ll go inside. I pick that one.’
Ber Lusim nodded and indicated with a sweep of the hand that Rush should go first.
Choking on fear and humiliation, Rush stepped into the dark.
To get to the factory’s front gate meant driving around three of the four walls of the compound, but Kennedy just dropped the truck down a gear and took it straight through the fence. A length of the wire-mesh weave remained wrapped around the windshield, and one of the cement posts was ripped out of the ground and went bounding along the ground behind them like a dog.
Diema had used the time while they drove to call Kuutma, but she was answered with the brutal bathos of a voicemail message. She told him in a few terse sentences what Kennedy had guessed, and put the phone down just as Kennedy took the fence.
The
rhaka
slewed the truck around, raising a tidal wave of gravel, and was already jumping down out of the driver’s side before the heavy vehicle had stopped rocking on its axis. She sprinted ahead of Diema into the building, but slowed once inside to get her bearings.
‘There!’ Diema said, pointing. It wasn’t hard to see where they needed to go: the X that marked the spot was Nahir’s crumpled body, sprawled just inside the doorway that connected the main factory floor to the smaller room beyond.
Diema drew both a gun and a sica, and approached Nahir cautiously. Nothing moved on the other side of the doors. There was no clue as to what had struck him, and no sign of the two Adamites.
She let Kennedy examine Nahir, standing guard over them both while she did so. To her surprise, it was apparent as soon as Kennedy turned the man over onto his back that he was alive. He’d fought and lost, and in that process taken a horrific beating. Blood saturated both of his arms and was still pumping weakly from his gashed wrists. He’d taken an injury to the head, too – an attack that had destroyed the orbit of his right eye. Kennedy flinched from the sight of that wound. Diema didn’t. A buried part of her reflected on how the matter of the eye itself had become tears, spilling down Nahir’s cheek, and how that effect might be rendered in oil pastels. Another part, shocked and protesting, reminded her that she had lain with this man. And a third part, that embraced both of the others and then subsumed them, noted that Nahir’s condition proved the validity of Kennedy’s guesswork. Ber Lusim was here. Now.
Nahir was trying to speak.
Diema knelt beside him. ‘Nahir,’ she said. His lips worked, but the sounds that came from them were formless and atomised.
‘Ber Lusim,’ Diema prompted. ‘Where is he? Where is he now?’
Nahir’s good eye flicked to the grease pit and his finger jerked twice –
down
.
Diema gathered herself and was about to stand. But Nahir’s forearm bumped against hers. He was trying to grip her arm, but the fingers of his hand were incapable of responding to his brain’s commands. All they could do was twitch in tiny, random saccades.
‘Too … quick…’ Nahir whispered. ‘Too … too … quick … to …’ He took a deep, shuddering breath and tried again. ‘Don’t … fight. Too …’